Politico talked to former US Rep. and NRCC Chairman, Tom Davis, about Tim Pawlenty's recent shift to the right.
"For a lot of moderates who look at Pawlenty as reasonable, it’s kind of disappointing."
Which reminds me: On October 6, Davis mused on the 2012 field.
He thought Romney was "kind of spent", Palin too divisive, Thune "really good", Kasich "one of the best", and Bloomberg a fall-back in case of an economic catastrophe.
At the time, Davis said Pawlenty was still undefined. Evidently, no more.
UPDATE: AllahPundit took up the case of T-Paw's conversion yesterday, while analyzing Pawlenty's tough talk about Obama in Newsmax.
Short of pounding the table and demanding that Rush Limbaugh be given an NFL franchise, this is the quickest, easiest way imaginable to purchase credibility with the base.
.... If he’s [Pawlenty] going to go that far with Obama to polish his conservative authenticity, he might as well go all the way and endorse Doug Hoffman. And lo, it came to be:
Of course every candidate does this for the primary, but Pawlenty's shift has been pretty sharp, and he's already ramped up the rhetoric considerably just within this year.
It was just 8 months ago, on February 1, that Pawlenty talked stimulus stuff with John King and sounded almost Cristonian.
"We're not going to be bashful about getting our fair share."
And there was T-Paw, in January, talking about what kind of "future thinking" Republicans needed.
"I'll give you two actual examples that we should have seen coming instead of dragging behind on it. One is environment and conservation.
This was an issue that, in many Republican quarters, conservative quarters, was dismissed as recently as a few years ago, much less in the 1990s....
Does October 2009 Pawlenty say that?
And that's not even getting into his relative moderation in prior years, which famously angered Bob Novak in summer 2008.
